Screenshots: All The Best Features In The New BlackBerry Phones

Kevin Smith/Business Insider
BlackBerry officially unveiled its brand new operating system called BlackBerry 10 this week.

The OS will run on two new smartphones called the BlackBerry Z10 (a touchscreen-only phone) and the BlackBerry Q10 (a phone with a classic BlackBerry physical keyboard). The phones will launch in the U.S. in March (Z10) and April (Q10).

BlackBerry gave a bunch of industry analysts, tech pundits, and members of the press a Z10 to test out BlackBerry 10.

Want to see what it's like? Check out the gallery below for a full tour of BlackBerry 10.

This is the lock screen. You can see updates such as new emails and Twitter notifications to the left.

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Swipe up to unlock the phone. There's a really cool animation when you do so.

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If you swipe from the top of the screen down on the lock screen you can shut off notifications. This is great if you don't want to be disturbed.

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Here's the home screen. Apps are displayed in a grid, just like they are on the iPhone.

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Swipe from right to left to see more apps. Again, it's just like the iPhone.

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If you swipe down from the top of the screen you get a handy menu of settings to control WiFi, Bluetooth, and your alarm.

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Now for the cool part. BB10 has a new feature called BlackBerry Hub, which is a notifications center that stores all your new emails, Twitter notifications, Facebook updates, etc. You can access the Hub by swiping from left to right.

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Keep swiping from left to right to break the Hub down by individual apps.

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BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is incredible. It's way better than any other messaging platform out there including iMessage and GroupMe. Unfortunately, not many people use BBM nowadays.

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This is what it looks like when you chat with BBM. You can also make video calls and share your screen via BBM.

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BBM also lets you "peek" at other screens by swiping over.

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You can see BBM updates such as Foursquare check-ins from the Updates tab.

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Here's what the regular texting app looks like. Nothing fancy.

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Typing on the touchscreen keyboard is a dream. The keyboard can predict what you're going to type next, letting you "flick" the word up into the text field. Very cool!

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BBM also lets you organize your contacts by group for mass texting.

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You can invite new people to be your BBM friend by using the person's special PIN. Each BlackBerry user gets his or her own PIN.

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If you swipe from the bottom of the screen up and keep your finger still, you can get a "peek" at recent notifications. They appear on the left of your screen.

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Keep swiping up and let go to get out of an app. Your recent apps appear on your home screen.

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Here's what it looks like when you have several apps running at once. You can tap to open again or tap the tiny X to close the app for good.

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Here's the Twitter app that comes preinstalled on the Z10.

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And here's the Facebook app. It's nearly identical to Facebook on iPhone and Android.

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RIM says its App World store will have about 70,000 apps at launch.

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But despite some big titles like Angry Birds and New York Times, a lot of the apps are junk or rip offs of other popular apps on iPhone and Android.

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The biggest rip off is an app called Tiny Bird, which is a blatant copy of the popular iPhone game Tiny Wings. Tiny Bird was one of the most popular apps when BB10 launched.

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The App World store lets you purchase music from all the major record labels.

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There are also a bunch of movies...

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...and TV shows.

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You can search the App World by category by swiping over from the left to right.

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You can sync BB10 with most major services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

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Unfortunately, we couldn't get our Google Calendar to show up.

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BB10's web browser is very impressive. When you first launch, you see tiles of the pages you've recently visited. You can tap to go back to one or enter a new URL in the bar at the bottom.

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Here's the New York Times mobile website.

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You can swipe over to view bookmarks, history, open a new browsing tab, or cycle through open tabs.

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There's a Dropbox app preinstalled on Z10, but it's actually made by BlackBerry, not Dropbox. It doesn't have all the cool Dropbox features like automatic camera uploads that the iPhone and Android versions have.

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The Z10 also has a very simple app for managing documents like PowerPoint presentations.

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BB10 has an app called Story Maker that lets you stitch together photos and videos and make a short presentation.

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There are a lot of cheesy tracks preloaded in the app.

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You can add filters to your presentation too.

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The Newsstand app has a bunch of magazines and periodicals you can download.

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BB10 has a Siri-like voice control app. It's not that great.

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It took a few tries to get the app to send a text message. You're better off performing tasks the old fashioned way.

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The camera app has a cool feature that takes several photos at once and lets you swap out the "best face" from the bunch. This is the shot we got out of our photo shoot with Alyson Shontell.

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The phone app is pretty basic. Nothing special to see here!

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The maps app is pretty bad. Let's find out why...

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We tried searching for a nearby lunch spot in New York. Instead, we got locations from all over the U.S. That's annoying.

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See? After several tries we got frustrated and gave up.

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At least BB10 knows where a major landmark like the Empire State Building is. Let's go there!

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You can get driving directions. Unfortunately, you can't get public transit directions like you can with Google Maps.